


I don't know what I'm doing lmao

by PossessedRobot



Category: No Fandom
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-08-08
Updated: 2020-08-08
Packaged: 2021-03-06 02:48:38
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,755
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/25786129
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/PossessedRobot/pseuds/PossessedRobot
Summary: I don't but also I've never really shared any personal writings before.  Uh all characters belong to me I guess.
Kudos: 3





	I don't know what I'm doing lmao

**Author's Note:**

> This is a rough prologue to a thing I've been thinking about writing for a long time. I haven't written much in the last year or two for a lot of reasons and I feel like I'm VERY rusty.

“You’re leaving?” That question was full of a surprising amount of hurt feelings, and for a second, Barry stalled at the door of the garage. One more second and a pressed button later, and the garage door started to rattle up its track. Time was moving unbearably slow.

And Barry, ever the coward, knew he’d lose his nerve if he didn’t leave right now, “...Yeah, actually.” He looked over his shoulder at the broad-shouldered man, dressed in oily clothes, heavy gloves hanging from a well-worn utility belt. “It’s now or never, Jams.”

Jammy sighed and sat on an overturned bucket. “I guess it is, then. Your gramps is gonna kill me, you know. I never should’ve let you work on that thing here.” That thing being the frankenstein’d van Barry had spent the summer reviving. Through a combination of the internet, Jammy, and his own wits, Barry had fixed a derelict van from the 70’s, side-stepping his usual summer job with his grandfather to “relax” and “work on his own pet projects,” and now it was time to put that project to use. “I got half a mind to call him right now, you know.”

“Ah,” says Barry, his grin spreading as his confidence grew. Jammy, a man more like an older brother than a neighbor, understood Barry’s ultimate goal here more than anyone, and his unspoken consent to this ramshackle affair was a major confidence booster. “But you won’t.” The door shuts tight, with Barry sliding a seatbelt on. A cigarette appears in his hand. “Just like you didn’t tell him when I started smoking at your house.” Jammy just shakes his head and rubs the back of his head.

“You’re a terrible little kid, and a worse adult,” is all Jammy has to say, rising to his feet and exiting to the kitchen. He stops at the door and calls to Barry over the rumbling of the engine, another ramshackle affair, “Go be terrible elsewhere, and be good at it!” Barry waves in response, no tears, no real indication that there’s any weight to this last moment; and it would be the last moment, if he had his way.

Barry was leaving, and he had no intention of staying. Living and dying in Nevada, under the protection and guidance of his grandfather, was no better than living and dying under the thumb of the rest of his family, even if the only restraints this time were guilt and obligation, as opposed to, well, restraints. By God, Barry had bad decisions to make for himself, and they weren’t going to be made here.

-

An hour later, a twenty-three year-old man, thin as a rail and weak as a twig, with no food, a wad of secret cash, and a duffel bag of dirty clothes was still in that little town, sitting on the corner of a parking lot of a Wendy’s. It was one in the afternoon, and the next town over was eight hours away. It didn’t pay to hesitate, but Barry’s resolve had hit a bump in the road. Despite his best intentions, he had made ties and bonds here that he suddenly felt he couldn’t bear to break. His grandfather was loud, surly, rude, but his care and controlling nature was born from a place of genuine love. Jammy, and to a maybe greater extent his little brother Dante, were always the most supportive people Barry had ever known. A tear rolled down his cheek, and in it he wished he could secrete the last bits of regret, or apprehension, or whatever stayed his feet from pushing hard on that gas pedal.

He also thought of Bellamy Balder, a woman he’d known for years, who’d always entertained Barry’s wild ambitions and stupid dreams, even as each one never left the conceptual stage, even as her own ambitions began to outstrip his own. Barry always felt like a hanger-on, an orbiter to a woman who might’ve reciprocated high-school ideals of true love if his spine had been made of a material other than styrofoam. Even in college, she stuck around him, spending her free time bugging him while he tinkered away on a gadget, or had begun the nascent stages of raising his dingy van from the dead. It was Bellamy that finally convinced him to bail; she bet him three hundred dollars that he was “too chicken shit” to do it. And since Barry was already closer to dropping out of college (and probably off a bridge) than he was to anything worthwhile, he took her up on the bet.

“Of course, if I bail, she won’t have t’pay up.” Barry thought to himself. He squinted into the distance, mouth drawn out into a line, kermit-like. “Witty bitch.” He had himself a quiet laugh and wiped his eyes before kicking the van to life and pulling himself and his plans together. Step one: Drive East. Step two: ???

If Barry had his way, he’d just drive till he hit ocean, and then spend the rest of his life living in a shack of palm fronds and sticks, fishing forever. Even though he didn’t really have the patience for fishing. And he really liked air-conditioning. And regular, daily routines. Barry figured this major life change would either ruin his life, or make it. Either way, he’d have something to complain about, and that’s all he ever really wanted. Luckily for everyone, a distraction pulled Barry from his thoughts, and he was forced to pull over once again, this time on the last road out of town.

Sitting on a suitcase was a small man. Slender like Barry, but without the indication that it was his fault, like Barry, and with a soft face to match. A soft face Barry would know anywhere, considering it was Dante. Effeminate, but infinitely smarter than Barry in the ways he wished he was himself. Dante couldn’t build a grappling hook, but he did know how to budget and he could hold his liquor. Barry had pulled off to Dante’s side of the road, stopping just in front of his childhood friend, who jumped up and skipped over to the driver side window.

His voice wasn’t quite as soft as the rest of him, though there was a way he enunciated words and phrased sentences that was very unique to Dante, and even though Barry’d only “run away from home” two hours prior, he felt a wash of warmth over him (despite the Nevada sun beating down on them) as if he hadn’t seen Dante in years. “Barry, dear, it’s been too long!” Maybe it had been a couple of years, in retrospect. Dante got a job and moved across town while Barry was a freshman in college, and their free-times lined up less and less.

Barry tried to play it cool, though his emotions were still running decidedly uncool, “Yeah man, I guess it has, huh.” As inoffensive as possible, a blow-off answer that Barry didn’t mean to fumble out. But Dante, like Jammy, knew Barry better than anyone, and pushed on.

“Where you going in such a hurry, bud?” In response, Barry just kind of shrugged.

“Anywhere, I guess. East. The Ocean, probably. That, or I’m going home and jumping off a bridge.” Barry smiled wanly and shrugged again. “I’m going not-here, I guess.”

Dante nodded along, thin, delicate-looking eyebrows arching with a blend of curiosity and mischief Barry didn’t recognize. “Off to greener-” Dante made a show of looking around at the desert encroaching all around them, “Well, any colored pastures that aren’t brown?” Barry nodded, knuckles white around the steering wheel. He had regain his nerves in the parking lot, but the situation wasn’t any different from when he piled himself and his handful of shit into the van: the longer he waits and talks about it, the more his cowardice’ll pull him out of this foolhardy plan.

So he changed the topic. “Wait Dante, what’re you doing?” It took him a minute, but he put the pieces together: The rolled up paper in Dante’s back pocket, the massive roller suitcase.

“Well, apparently great minds think alike, hun.” Dante smiled, blinking slowly. “Except I don’t have a horrible ride to break-down in the desert and kill me like you do, so I was just going to hitch to the next down and get on the train.”

“Where were you planning on-”

“Oh, East. Like I said, thinking alike.” Barry proffered a pair of cigarettes, nodding in agreement, or maybe just acknowledgment, as Dante took one of the smokes and let Barry light it. In that moment, Barry unconsciously recognized that he personally considered the act of lighting Dante’s cigarette, while it was in his mouth, an intimate act. It made his chest fuzzy for a minute, his focus and brain operating as two separate entities on two separate trains of thought, both of them asking the big questions. Barry’s mouth, wired to his idiot brain and taking that fuzzy chest as a sort of intuition or gut feeling, asked, “Well, hey, how about you hitch and ride on my horrible breakdown with me- what?” Tripping over his own words, Dante got the idea and laughed, taking a drag.

“Sure thing, Hooked-on-Phonics, I’ll hitch and ride.” And with that, he sauntered off to his bag, and Barry, sat, fixed in one position, taking a long drag off his cigarette. That second train of thought, the one he wasn’t aware about but was causing a fuzzy chest and a mouth with two-left feet in it, was beginning to pick up steam, memories being dumped into the engine like coals, pieces of an equation.

By the time Barry’s covert thought-train finally came crashing into the turnstiles at station, Dante had tossed his suitcase into the back of the van and slid into the passenger seat. “You ever hear about that American superstition about you have to put something in the passenger side seat if it’s empty or you’ll let demons or something in?” Dante’s voice rang above the crying screams of Barry’s crashed train of thought, mercifully ending this metaphor and snapping him out of it, just in time to gracelessly get a huge column of ash into an empty starbucks cup.

“Uh, what?” Barry shook his head and rubbed his eyes. “I thought that was only for like, corn-field people.” Dante laughed and shook his head, while Barry’s solo campaign to the East started once more, now a co-operative misadventure. It’s too hot for demons here.”


End file.
